Orchestra

Orchestra (オーケストラ) is an 89 × 114 cm oil on canvas painted by Migishi Kōtarō in 1933 and now in the collection of the Miyagi Museum of Art. The painting is one of two large Orchestra compositions Migishi produced that year — the other (Orchestra-2) is also in the Miyagi collection — that together represent the most ambitious figural works of his late period. The painting shows a group of musicians arranged across a flattened pictorial space, their bodies and instruments rendered in the patterned, slightly stiff figural mode that Migishi had developed in the clown paintings of the late 1920s, but with the dense interior grounds of those earlier works opened out into a pale, atmospheric space populated by ambiguous shadow forms. The composition reads as a halfway point between the figurative clown paintings of the late 1920s and the unmoored surrealist seascapes of 1934, and the introduction of musical performance as a subject — already present in Picasso's musicians of the 1910s and the surrealist appropriations of Watteau in the 1920s — places Migishi within a contemporary European discourse on performance and disjuncture. The painting was exhibited at the third Dokuritsuten in 1933 and entered the Miyagi Museum of Art collection in the postwar period, where it has been frequently reproduced as one of the museum's principal early-Shōwa yōga holdings.